Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

I am up for “aurally-emphatic”, except that it too is orally-ungainly, + olfactorily—and tactilely—
etc... that’s 4 senses out of 5... oh yes—Here’s my new book of poetry. Would you like to lick it?
I am very interested by associations that I certainly feel between the text and expressive and
responsive gesture and movement: body as readable shape, line as physical movement, page as
room and so on.
I was impressed by Robert Sheppard’s work presented with dancers a few years back, although
that seemed to be a case of a poet reading and a dancer dancing at the same time. I feel I might
have followed that up for myself. I have, increasingly I think, used gesture in my performance; but
there’s a long way to go.
It’s a pity that touch screens have not become more popular. I’d be much more interested in
offering you the chance to point to places on your screen than I am in getting you to click there
with a sophisticated flick of the wrist, the rest of the body hardly moving. [When, earlier this year,
I referred to the use of a touch screen as a gestural interaction, in an email exchange, I mistyped
and spoke of ‘getting you to lick on the screen’; and I may follow that up at some point in an
installation, if I can think my way round the hygiene problems.]
Going beyond the linear is something which happens again and again. It is not, therefore,
something happening for the first time at the end of the end of the twentieth century along with
mobile phones, the commercialisation of the Internet and the pill for men. History isn’t linear.
The visual text is the text that is not, or is less, cleaned up, rationalised, standardised, made
ungraphic, et cetera... But this is my perspective from where I believe we are now.
I am not saying that the visual is prior to the linear. I expect that, chronologically, the linear
precedes or sometimes precedes the alinear.
In this context, I don’t think that it matters.
I do not see what Cobbing is doing has anything to do with concepts such as ur-language. The
visual text is an attempt at a whole response. It isn’t, therefore, that the visual text is a special
case, a variation from the norm of the linear.
Perhaps, when it is necessary to denote one’s linear poetry as distinct from the visual, the term
“lineated poetry” might be better, indicating that it is writing to which someone has taken a
physical limitation.
One has to be trained to write in straight lines; and writing paper often comes with straight lines
on it. This indicates a non-linear tendency; although that is not necessarily an indication of
priority, only that linearity is a cultural option.
Perhaps, however, that linearity affects how we structure our writing.
Perversely, just regarding lined paper or the word-wrapping word-processor as a recording